Pop-up newspaper The New European is still going strong 7 months after launch

The paper was initially due to run for four weeks, but is now turning a profit with a strong community-based audience.

The number one objective for a newspaper is to be talked about,” said Matt Kelly, editor of The New European, speaking at the Digital Media Strategies conference (22 February).

He explained that the ‘pop-up’ national paper, which went from concept to publication in nine days, owes its success to the strength of the community which it serves – the 48 per cent (16 million) of Britons who voted to remain in the European Union.

“On the day of the result, there was a sense of bereavement, that something awful had just happened – a collective sense of gloom,” he said.

“I thought, what could be the paper that one of the 48 per cent would pick up and carry around to demonstrate that they were part of that very clear, self-defined group of people that suddenly felt disenfranchised?”

The idea that print could be a form of visible anger and sense of community led regional publisher Archant to boldly launch a weekly newspaper on 8 July 2016.

“The idea is that it costs £2 to join a community and you get a free newspaper every week, and that’s very much the sense we’ve got from our audience,” he said. It’s the defined audience that has prevented it from slipping by the wayside like other new publications such as The New Day, which closed just nine weeks after it launched, he added.